Gun Control’s Black Lives Matter Problem

June has been marked in recent years by a flurry of orange-clad marchers promoting National Gun Violence Awareness Month. This year’s planned gatherings, however, fell victim to the COVID-19 pandemic and were overshadowed by Black Lives Matter’s nationwide protests against institutional racism within policing. But the gun-control lobby’s reticence isn’t out of respect for the lives of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor but rather concern for its own preservation.

For decades, gun-control advocates promoted greater police power as well as known practices of institutional racism within police firearms-licensing divisions. Now that there are calls to “defund the police,” many leaders of the gun-control lobby, who are mostly white, should rightly fear that their history of siding with the police and promoting policies now deemed racist by progressives may make them the next casualty of cancel culture.

Gun control in the U.S. has historically been rooted in racism of the blatant “no blacks allowed” variety. Fundamentally, it is difficult to subjugate a group if it’s armed. This is why restrictions on minority gun ownership pre-date not only the institution of slavery in the U.S. but the Founding itself. The modern gun-control movement has supported a more insidious method of using police discretion and biased background checks to suppress firearms-license issuance.

New York’s Sullivan Act is one of the best examples of gun-control laws that put minorities at a disadvantage, and it has been widely copied. Passed in 1911, the law addressed what was considered a growing problem of gun ownership among minorities, immigrants, labor organizers, and anyone seen as a threat.